Introducing Water is Place — a 7-episode series filmed on the Laramie River
There’s a question I’ve been sitting with for a long time, standing at the edge of this river in Laramie, Wyoming, watching the water move past.
Indigenous peoples around the world have understood something that modern life has largely forgotten: we are made of water, and we become the water of wherever we live. The science supports this. In roughly six months, the water you drink gradually replaces the water in your cells. You don’t just live somewhere — eventually, you are somewhere.
I’ve been drinking the water of Laramie for 18 months now, which means some of this river, these mountains, this high desert is already part of me. But the relationship runs both ways, and this is the part that doesn’t get said often enough.
The Water Carries Everything
Everything we shed enters the water — medications flushed down the drain, nitrates leaching from a septic system, fertilizer from the lawn, road runoff, even our DNA. All of it gets carried downstream. The water doesn’t ask permission. It simply carries what we give it.
From here, the Laramie River flows northeast to the North Platte, which joins the Platte in Nebraska, which empties into the Missouri, which delivers everything to the Mississippi. And the Mississippi carries all of it—everything this watershed sheds—to the Gulf of Mexico. About 60% of the continental United States drains into that Gulf.
That Gulf is in serious trouble. Every summer, a dead zone forms off Louisiana (sometimes larger than the state of New Jersey) where dissolved oxygen crashes so low that fish, shrimp, and crabs either flee or die. Nutrients flushed down the Mississippi from farms, cities, and septic systems across the entire basin drive this collapse. Those nutrients come from places exactly like the Casper Aquifer recharge zone here in Albany County, Wyoming.
Wyoming is not a coastal state. But the Laramie River doesn’t know that.
The Problem Isn’t Ignorance
We know our bodies are connected to water. We understand, in some abstract sense, that what goes into the water goes somewhere. Even so, the problem isn’t ignorance — it’s disconnection.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped thinking of ourselves as part of the water. Instead, we turned it into infrastructure: a bill, a tap, a drain. We act like there’s an away. There isn’t. It’s all one system, and we are part of that system whether we think about it or not.
This series is about reconnecting; about following the water and letting it show us exactly where we are in it, and what we’ve been putting in.
What Water is Place Is
Water is Place is a 7-episode documentary mini-series filmed on the Laramie River over the summer of 2026, produced as part of the Cultivating Currents Youtube channel.
Each episode follows the water a little further: first through the philosophy of place and belonging, then into the geology of fractured limestone aquifers, through the science of harmful algal blooms, and finally into the human memory of water systems we grew up with and watched change. The series closes at a public library in Laramie, where a room full of kids test the water themselves.
Episodes drop weekly. This is the introduction.
A Note on the River
The Laramie River is currently running at roughly 43.6 cubic feet per second, historically low for early June. This past winter was unusually warm and dry, and the snow pack that normally recharges both the river and the Casper Aquifer simply didn’t arrive. Because the Casper Aquifer supplies more than half of Laramie’s drinking water, that absence matters. Laramie is already in drought.
According to the most recently published testing data (EWG/EPA, 2021–2023), Laramie’s tap water contains 16 contaminants that exceed health guidelines. Some originate in the river. Others form during the treatment process itself. Still others enter through aging distribution pipes between the plant and your tap. The water at your tap is not the same as the water in the river, but it starts there.
That’s what this series is about.
Follow the Water
If you’re a young person near any waterway that drains to the Gulf or the Atlantic—a river, a creek, a pond, a drainage ditch in a city that flows to a tributary that flows to the Mississippi—the Cultivating Currents’ Ambassador Program opens this summer. You’ll use real science protocols, submit real data to NOAA’s national database, and receive a science kit, training, and a place on the map.
You don’t need to live near the ocean. You’re already upstream of it.
Subscribe on YouTube and follow the water